Battery independence: Reducing the dependence on batteries in wearable computing through energy harvesting techniques

Abstract

This paper discusses one of the most troublesome and frustrating issues for mobile devices users, battery life. Once a battery is utilized in a system, battery charging must be incorporated seamlessly so that the workflow of the user is uninterrupted. In today's fast-paced society, people don't have the time to stop what they are doing to charge their mobile devices and wait for them to complete. A secondary known issue concerning batteries is that their effective capacity diminishes over time and use. In turn the process of battery charging would become more frequent and disruptive to the user. The need for an effective means to continually charge the battery through smart energy harvesting techniques will be investigated in the following paper. Utilizing the findings from other articles, we were able to generate easy-to-use formulas to help estimate the power across multiple real-world use cases (running, walking, sleeping, sun, shade, etc.) Testing the formulas across multiple use cases, only two of the cases generated more power in our application than what the system utilized. This excess power would be utilized to keep the battery's charge topped off. In the use cases where we didn't generate enough power, the battery would need to supplement the system.